On 03/31/2026, the following question has been posted on r/TOR
- Are there any good explanations on why these spikes occurred?
- Might those outages imply some centralized infrastructure? If so, how is that not a mayor concern?
[…]
- The relay user stats | metrics.torproject.org (archive.org) consistently shows gaps (or users=0?) on data for (1, 2, 3, 5), no anomaly for (4), a huge gap (archive.org) from 31.1 to 7.3
- t/all-my-webtunnels-and-obfs4-are-status-red
I restarted rdsys a while ago and this seems to have fixed some of the issues, but maybe not all of them. […]
explains (4) which probably is the same as my original explanation: Graphs on Metrics website are not updated | torproject.org
Is there a known (verifiable) cause for those partial outages?
Another user suggested (comment):
I would expect that the downward spikes are simply measurement problems. And I would expect that the metrics are gathered from a single location, or a very few locations. And certainly processed in a single location.
this explanation would raise more questions, such as (comment):
In the graph from 2010 until today, it appears that there were barely any spikes between 2019 and 2023. I imagine there would have to be some change in maybe 2022 at the metrics measurement servers which significantly decreased reliability.
Also, since the count doesn’t drop to 0, there must at least some partial log have been available. e.g. the measurement can’t origin from one single server.